Defiant Brides (8 page)

To soften relations between the two groups and meet Philadelphia’s fashionable young beauties, Arnold hosted a ball at the fashionable City Tavern with a guest list that included Tories and neutralists, as well as patriots. Inevitably the “disaffected” emerged triumphant, their beaded gowns gleaming in the candlelight, their two-feet-high hairdos towering over the caps of patriot women in their crude clothes. Horrified, Reed complained to Nathanael Greene that Arnold’s guest list included “not only common Tory ladies but wives and daughters of persons proscribed [listed] by the state.”
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By late August 1778, the Shippen sisters and their friends had fully redeemed their status as Philadelphia’s most admired belles. The precipitant was again political, this time driven by demands for a municipal ball in honor of the August 7 arrival of French minister plenipotentiary Count Conrad Alexandre Gerard. Aghast to discover that Philadelphia could not supply enough stylish patriotic women to fill the ballroom and impress Gerard, city leaders consequently added Peggy Shippen and other ladies of the Mischianza to the guest list.

“We have a great many balls and entertainments, and soon the Assemblies will begin,” Mary White Morris, the tall young wife of Robert Morris, wrote her mother that summer. “Even our military gentlemen are too liberal to make any distinction between Whig and Tory ladies. If they make any, it is in favor of the latter. . . . [It] originates at [Arnold’s] headquarters.”
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Through the Robert Morrises, Arnold met their relative Judge Edward Shippen and, inevitably, Shippen’s daughter Peggy. Theories vary about where that introduction took place, among them the Shippen drawing room, the City Tavern, the ball for Count Gerard, or one of Arnold’s galas held at his home. By late summer the crippled general was escorting Peggy to dinners, receptions, and the theater, smitten with her beauty, wit, and spirit. When criticized for courting the neutralist (or possibly Tory) daughter of Judge Shippen, Arnold merely shrugged. After all, as military governor of Philadelphia he was obliged to restore peace. What better way to smooth political differences and unite opposing factions than through such a romance?

For all her superficial sophistication, Peggy was overwhelmed. To her, as to other Philadelphia beauties who clustered around the handsome general at galas, Arnold, his game leg propped upon a stool, seemed a warrior of mythic proportions. That his heroic military record was complemented by his gallant manners, and that he was cultured and appreciated high living only added to his appeal. Hobbling about on a white, jewel-encrusted cane and a built-up shoe to compensate for the two inches lost in height to his crippled leg, Arnold’s disability reminded others of his heroism at Montreal and Quebec City; at Valcour Island and Saratoga, New York; and at Ridgefield, Connecticut.

His courtship with Peggy Shippen immediately titillated Philadelphia society. “I must tell you that Cupid has given our little general a more mortal wound than all the hosts of Brittons could,” Mary White Morris reported to her mother. “Miss Shippen is the fair one.”
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By September, Arnold’s ardor had spilled over in two letters—one to Edward Shippen and the other to Peggy. The first assured the judge that he had no interest in the Shippen money. “My fortune is not large, though sufficient . . . to make us both happy. I neither expect nor wish one [a dowry] with Miss Shippen. My public character is well known; my private one is, I hope, irreproachable.” Nor did Arnold consider the Revolution an obstacle. “Our difference in political sentiments will, I hope, be no bar to my happiness,” he smoothly observed. “I flatter myself the time is at hand when our unhappy contest will be at an end, and peace and domestic happiness be restored to everyone.”
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On the twenty-fifth, Arnold wrote to Peggy, repeating almost verbatim his love letter sent two years earlier to Betsy DeBlois: “Twenty times have I taken up my pen to write to you, and as often has my trembling hand refused to obey the dictates of my heart,” he began. His passion was “not founded on personal charms only; that sweetness of disposition and goodness of heart, that sentiment and sensibility which so strongly mark the character of the lovely Miss P. Shippen, renders her amiable beyond expression and will ever retain the heart she has once captivated.” Only the last line of his letter was new: “Whatever my fate may be, my most ardent wish is for your happiness; and my last breath will be to implore the blessings of heaven on the idol and only wish of my soul.”
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Neither Peggy nor her father responded initially. One objection they may have had was Arnold’s social status. Though now a major general, he was formerly a middle-class Connecticut apothecary. Another was the nineteen-year gap in age between Arnold, then thirty-six, and Peggy. A third was his crippled leg, and a fourth, that the widowed general was the father of three sons, then cared for by his sister in Connecticut, who would likely join his Philadelphia household.

During that autumn of 1778, the Shippens were also preoccupied with the forthcoming marriage of daughter Betsy, who, on December 17, would marry her cousin, the judge’s protégé, Neddy Burd. Just before that wedding, with its twenty-five bridesmaids, Betsy had panicked. “How is it with your highness now have you got over all your little palpitations,” her cousin Elizabeth Tilghman later teased, “shameless girl, how could you have been so naughty as to have so many witnesses to your actions?”
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Sitting by her jittery sister Betsy’s side the night before the ceremony, Peggy began worrying about the prospect of her own wedding night. Legend has it that the eighteen-year-old virgin took a “solemn oath never to change her state.” Soon afterwards, though, she retracted that vow. Instead she giddily bet an older family friend a pair of gloves there would be “twelve marriages among her acquaintances” before the next Christmas.
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Four days after Betsy’s wedding, Judge Shippen wrote his father, “I gave my daughter Betsy to Neddy Burd last Thursday evening and all is jollity and mirth.” Peggy, he added, “is much solicited by a certain general on the same subject. Whether this will take place or not depends on circumstances. If it should, it will not be until spring.”
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The judge remained uneasy. Conceivably, Peggy’s marriage to the commandant could advance his own ambitions for a new court appointment, but counterbalancing that were rumors about Arnold’s unsavory business deals in New Haven. Moreover, by late 1778, the commandant’s reputation within Philadelphia’s political hothouse had begun to wither.

The trouble began when Arnold’s aide, David Salisbury Franks, ordered nineteen-year-old sergeant William Matlack to fetch Arnold a barber. When the man failed to appear, Franks cursed the sergeant, who, in turn, complained to his father, the secretary of the Supreme Executive Council. Before long Arnold received an irate letter from the elder Matlack: “At a time when you were one of the militia, what would have been
your
feelings had an aide of your commanding officer ordered
you
to call his barber? Free men will be hardly brought to submit to such indignities.”
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To that Arnold coldly replied, “The respect due to the citizen is by no means to be paid to the soldier any further than his rank entitles him to it. . . . [As] an orderly sergeant, it is his duty to obey every offer of my aides.”
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Exchanges between the two grew increasingly acrimonious before Matlack related them to Reed, who added Arnold’s responses to his list of grievances against the commandant.

Soon, the list had grown even longer. In October
The Charming Nancy
, then partly owned by Arnold, arrived at Egg Harbor, New Jersey, loaded with West Indian goods and promptly looted by the British. Most of the cargo, however, was still intact, leading Arnold to have it stored in a warehouse. Then he asked the army’s quartermaster, John Mitchell, to round up sixteen wagons and have it hauled to the city. The use of government equipment for private purposes was illegal but done so frequently that Arnold never mentioned to Mitchell that the cargo was private property.

Another of Arnold’s missteps was a pass he illegally issued to one Hannah Levy so she could enter British-occupied New York City. Denied permission at the border, she again appealed to Arnold. This time he applied to the Supreme Executive Council for a “legal” pass. Mrs. Levy, the council informed Arnold, was a Loyalist whose male friend had attempted to smuggle a letter “inimical to the safety and liberties of the United States” across enemy lines.
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“Pennsylvania officials had long been frustrated over the exercise of Continental authority within their borders,” Joseph Reed complained to Congress months later, “and especially with the imperious conduct of the military commander of Philadelphia.”
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In November, Reed and Matlack began to excoriate Arnold to the newspapers. “I cannot think that the commanding officer views himself exposed to any real danger in this city,” sneered their letter in the influential
Pennsylvania Packet
under the byline of “Militia Man.” “From a public enemy there can be none, from Tories, if any such there be amongst us, he had nothing to fear, they are all remarkable fond of him.”
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To Reed, who had ascended to the presidency of the Supreme Executive Council in December 1777, that was only prelude. Soon afterwards he filed a complaint about Arnold’s military misconduct with the Supreme Executive Council. Among his accusations were the commandant’s hostility to Matlack, illegal use of army wagons to haul
The Charming Nancy
’s cargo, and his issue of an illegal pass for a suspected spy. Infuriated, Arnold replied, that he was “at all times ready to answer my public conduct to Congress or General Washington, to whom alone I am accountable.”
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A bitter argument followed, sending tremors of anxiety through Congress. With Washington’s army in New Jersey, the delegates’ sole protection from British attacks was the Pennsylvania militia, whose salaries the Supreme Executive Council paid. If Arnold remained governor of the city, Reed threatened blackmail: he would withdraw the militia “until the charges against [Arnold] are examined.”
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For many months, Congress had looked askance at Arnold. As delegate, General John Cadwalader explained, “Every man who has a liberal way of thinking highly approve[s] his conduct,” but he had become “very unpopular [among] men of power in Congress.”
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Arnold returned that negative assessment. Congress, he complained to Nathanael Greene, was “distracted and torn with party and faction . . . debt accumulated to an . . . incredible sum, the currency daily depreciating, and Congress, if possible, depreciating still faster.”
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Little did Arnold seem to care that his own reputation had lost its currency. By mid-winter 1779, his one desire was to return to civilian life, with Peggy at his side.

Fueling that desire was a letter from General Philip Schuyler, Arnold’s friend and military colleague, which explained that the authorities of New York State planned to award Arnold land for his heroism at Saratoga. If he could “obtain a tract of any consequence,” Arnold responded, he was willing to become a citizen of New York. In return, he would establish “a settlement of officers and soldiers” to protect the state’s borders.
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Intrigued with the prospect of living like a landed European aristocrat, Arnold then reported to Judge Shippen that he anticipated “something handsome” with which to bestow a generous prenuptial settlement upon Peggy.
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For months, the romance had simmered along uncertainly as Peggy remained noncommittal even to her favorite sister, Betsy Shippen Burd. When a friend asked in a December 30 letter if Peggy would soon wed, Betsy replied, “Everyone tells me so with such confidence that I am laughed at for my unbelief. Does she know her own mind yet?”
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Betsy’s new husband, Edmund Burd, claimed Peggy did: “My expectations have been answered. From what I gather a lame leg is at present the only obstacle.” Arnold, he added, “from the slight knowledge I have of him to be a well-dispositioned man . . . one who will use his best endeavors to make P. happy and I doubt not, will succeed.”
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From Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Peggy’s grandfather, the patriarch Edward Shippen, also heartily approved “another match in the family, this one to the ‘fine gentleman.’”
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Gossips continued their chatter through January, prompting Elizabeth’s Tilghman’s declaration on the twenty-ninth: “I had like to have forgot the gentle Arnold . . . when is he like to convert our little Peggy? They say she intends to surrender soon. I thought the fort could not hold out long. Well, after all, there is nothing like perseverance and a regular attack.”
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By then, the teenager had conditionally accepted the “gentle” Arnold’s proposal—pending her father’s approval. One hundred and twenty years after this period, a Shippen descendent claimed in the
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
that Judge Shippen had had no choice but to consent to the marriage. Whenever he expressed doubts about Peggy’s proposed marriage, she reverted to her childhood pattern of weeping, taking to her bed, refusing to eat or drink, and, ultimately, becoming ill.

Ultimately, Judge Shippen consented. Possibly he did so because his own marriage twenty-eight years earlier to Peggy’s mother, Margaret Francis, had been a love match. “If I had obtained a girl with a considerable fortune no doubt the world would have pronounced me happier,” the future judge once wrote his father. “Happiness does not consist in being thought happy by the world, but in the internal satisfaction and contentment of the mind.”
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By late winter 1779, news of Peggy’s engagement became public knowledge. During Henry Knox’s visit to Congress in early winter, Arnold proudly introduced him to Peggy. Knox was immediately impressed that “our friend Arnold is going to be married to a beautiful and accomplished young lady, a Miss Shippen—of the best families in this place,” he gushed to his brother William.
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